


Cracking the Code

by Severina



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Community: smallfandomflsh, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:29:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1593287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month ago it was coded tracking numbers on their grocery receipts; the month before that, low-grade tranquilizers implanted in chicken breasts to keep people numb and complacent.  It really shouldn't surprise him that the crisis du jour is that the undead are rising to devour human flesh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracking the Code

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it's another zombie AU. So sue me. Written for LJ's smallfandomflsh for the prompt "harbinger". Thanks to Snick for answering my "what's the word for THIS" questions, because she's a supersmarty word nerd like that.
> 
> * * *

"I'm telling you, John, we need to take this seriously!"

"Uh huh."

John feels the sofa dip under Matt's weight when he sits beside him, knows without looking that Matt's wearing his usual wild-eyed-neurotic expression. He reaches out absently to place a hand on Matt's jittering leg, squeezes his thigh gently. A month ago it was coded tracking numbers on their grocery receipts; the month before that, low-grade tranquilizers implanted in chicken breasts to keep people numb and complacent. It really shouldn't surprise him that the crisis du jour is that the undead are rising to devour human flesh.

He should talk to Matt's doctor about putting the kid on valium or something. 

"It's right there, buried at the bottom of page thirteen," Matt says, stabbing a finger in the middle of the paper. 

"I thought you were the one who told me not to believe anything I read in the news," John says without looking up from the sports page.

"Thank you! That's what I'm saying!"

John glances up then, peers at Matt above his reading glasses. "You like talking in circles, kid?"

"You think The Times is telling the truth about this shit?" Matt huffs out a breath, levies himself up from the sofa to pace around the living room. Normally John would take this opportunity to appreciate the curve of his ass and the burgeoning biceps that are revealed with every patented Farrell arm-flail, but Matt's just too agitated to make it enjoyable this time. "You have to read between the lines, McClane!"

John arches a brow. "It's McClane now?"

"Listen to me," Matt says, flopping back down on the sofa next to him. "Will you just listen?"

He's tempted to remind Matt of the time he refused to buy milk because he thought Russian spies were poisoning the supply at the local 7-Eleven, but the stricken look on Matt's face makes him hold his tongue. Instead he sets his paper aside, gives the kid his undivided attention. At least this way he'll have all the 'facts' so he can effectively shut them down and get Matt's heart rate back to a reasonable level. Then he'll drag him to the bedroom and raise it again, because a manic Matthew Farrell is hot as hell. 

For now he plasters on his best good cop expression, imagines Matt as an overexcited witness to a crime. "I'm listening," he says.

"Okay," Matt says. He swipes a hand through his hair, gets up again to stride the length of the room. "Those first cases in Florida were just the beginning. You remember, the face-eaters? Homeless guys randomly attacking and eating other people? And they blamed that on bath salts, which was complete bullshit! You remember that, McClane?"

John does remember the lurid news stories, and the hastily called meeting of department heads to discuss this new drug and the ramifications it could have if it ever hit the streets of New York. And he remembers scouring through faxed copies of the forensic reports from Miami PD, and the internal sigh of relief when they all came back clean. No bath-salt-induced mania, just a couple of regular crazy guys. He keeps this all off his face of course – concerned cop here, no judgment, no facial expressions to lead the witness – and simply nods. "I remember."

"Florida. That was where it started," Matt continues. "After that there were cases in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama. Thirty four cases in Georgia alone! Then Tennessee, Kentucky. Texas. A pattern, McClane. New cases all the time, spreading north and northwest from Florida. Daily, sometimes."

John narrows his eyes. If there was suddenly an epidemic of insane people biting and eating other people, the NYPD would know about it. _He_ would know about it, because it could be some new chemical warfare shit and that is most definitely JTTF's department. Not to mention that it would be a little difficult to keep that shit out of the papers. He juts his chin now toward the abandoned Times, but Matt continues before he can open his mouth.

"They cover it up, McClane! No need to worry the masses, because then no one will go out and buy big screen TVs and gas guzzlers complete with inset blu-ray players and ipods that hold ten thousand songs! So instead they give the stories a paragraph below the ad for Ed's Used Car Emporium on the back page. And they can't tell the truth, don't want people rampaging through the streets in a panic! So it's always a measles outbreak that led to the quarantine of a hospital wing, or a chemical spill on Route 7, or a routine closure to check for gas leaks on the town line. But if you read between the lines—"

"—people are really dying, then getting up and walking around and biting other people?" McClane finishes dryly.

When Matt stops mid-stride, his shoulders slumping, John feels a twinge of regret at his bluntness. But sometimes a little tough love is the only thing that shakes Matt out of these funks, or else they end up schlepping all the way to the market on 57th for organic chicken, refusing receipts for their purchases and drinking soy milk.

Then Matt looks up, those sincere brown eyes boring into his until he finally has to look away. 

"Yes," Matt says.

John sighs. "Matt—"

"I know you don't believe half the shit I say," Matt says. "I get it, I do. You usually humour me and I appreciate that, I guess. But this is different, John. This is important! Do some research. You're a detective. Detect. That's all I'm asking."

John can only imagine the looks he's going to get at the precinct when he starts digging into reports of a gas leak in some podunk town in Tennessee. But he really can't resist Matt when he gets that look in his eyes. "All right," he says. "I'll detect."

* * *

John rolls over, blinks in the darkness before flicking his eyes to the alarm clock. He grunts at the time, flops over onto his back and closes his eyes. After three weeks of overtime, the last thing he fucking needs is to be waking up in the middle of the night for no goddamn reason. And he was just in the middle of a dream, something about vacationing at the cottage with Matt and a storm coming in, the old shutters on the place banging in the wind…

He opens his eyes at the thump on the front door. Lifts his head from the pillow and strains to hear, and has just decided that he's imagining things when he hears a second muffled blow. He briefly considers waking Matt – because the last time someone showed up in the middle of the goddamn night it was something about a death metal concert and a derailed train and he woke up to three long-hairs eating cereal straight out of the box in his living room – but one look shows him that Matt is still dead to the world and he just doesn't have the heart to nudge him. Damn kid doesn't get enough sleep as it is.

So he rubs at his chin and drags on a robe, makes his way to the door. Through the flimsy curtains on the side window he can see Ed from down the block leaning brokenly onto the frame. 

He flings the door open, already knowing that he'll find the man reeking of bourbon and two sheets to the wind. And even though he kipped out on Ed and Suzanne's sofa more times than he can remember back in his drinking days, he's still not letting Ed skate by without giving him shit. "Jesus Christ, Ed, it's three in the fuckin' morning!"

John has about four seconds to register the filmy white eyes, the greying skin, the blood-stained mouth, the slick intestines looping from the gaping stomach wound and dragging on the cement. He is reaching for the wall peg behind him when Ed takes the first staggering step into the house, has slipped the gun from the holster and flicked off the safety by the time Ed's lips pull back in a snarl. Ed takes another stumbling step and the smell hits him then – not whiskey but the sweet sickly odor of a corpse, the kind of thing he should only smell at a crime scene and not in his front entranceway. Not lurching toward him trailing slime-covered guts. 

It hits him like a punch to the solar plexus. Matt was right. Jesus Christ, Matt was right. 

His first shot catches Ed in the chest, sends him tumbling back toward the front porch. 

He doesn't go down. Blood erupts from the wound – thick brackish blood, sliding in heavy globs over Ed's pajama top – but Ed catches the edge of the doorframe, pulls himself upright and takes another swaying step toward him. 

His second bullet strikes Ed right between the eyes. The shot flings him backward onto the porch steps. This time the man stays down.

John swings when he hears the shuffle of feet behind him, the gun coming up instinctively. But it's just Matt, staring past him at the corpse. John must make a sound, because Matt jerks and swallows and looks up to meet his eyes. "I really hoped I was wrong," Matt says.

John lowers the gun, takes a single step forward with the intention of burying his arms around Matt, with holding on tight. But then Matt's gaze flicks over his shoulder, his eyes wide and shell-shocked, and John turns in time to see the others in the street turning slowly toward the open door, lurching drunkenly across his lawn. 

His neighbours, bloodied and torn apart and _dead_ and—

"Lucy," he says.

He slams the door shut, palms the deadbolt into place and strides toward the living room. "You have five minutes to gather up our shit," he barks over his shoulder as he grabs for the phone.

"I'm already ahead of you, John," Matt says, already moving past him into the bedroom. "What do you think those duffel bags in the hallway are?" 

John stabs in Lucy's number just as the first smacking fist hits the door. It's quickly joined by others, and by the time Matt returns to shove a handful of clothes into his arms he can barely hear the endless ringing of the phone in his ear.

"No answer!" he says. He can almost feel the plastic crack in his grip, the pounding on the door and the snarls and moans coming from the front porch sending him close to the brink. If one of those things gets to his Lucy…

No. That's not going to happen. John throws the phone on the sofa, pulls on the jeans that Matt gathered up for him just as Matt streaks by him, already fully clothed. "I've got the kitchen," Matt calls out. "You need to get the bullets, that shit's all locked up!"

It takes him less than a minute to dress, no more than two to unlock the cabinet and pile his accumulated ammunition into the canvas grocery bag that Matt throws his way. He checks his gun and shoulders one of the duffel bags before taking a breath and looking around the room for anything else they might need. His eyes flick from sofa to chair to television, and all he can think is _Lucy_.

"You know she's kicking asses with a combination of sarcastic quips and a stiletto heel right now, right?" Matt says.

John huffs out a half-laugh, tugs Matt into an awkward one-armed embrace. "Thank you for being so neurotically paranoid," he says into Matt's hair. "If you didn't have all this shit already packed up…" He pulls back quickly, because for some things you need to look a person in the eyes. "I'm sorry."

"That you didn't believe me when I said dead people were walking around?" Matt asks. "John, I barely believed me." He shakes the hair out of his eyes, hefts his baseball bat to get a better grip and flits his gaze to the front door where the pounding has only intensified. "Sneak out a window in the back?"

John nods, takes off for the rear of the house with Matt hard on his heels. "Aim for the head," he says over his shoulder. "Ed took one in the chest and it didn't even slow him down." 

He slows when he reaches the bedroom, eases inside and flicks at the curtains. He breathes easier when he sees that there's nothing moving in the postage stamp backyard. A quick dash around the corner to the driveway, load up the car and they should be on the road before those motherfuckers on the porch even realize they've left the house.

He hesitates with his hand on the sill when he feels Matt's fingers wrap around his bicep.

"Do we have a plan?" Matt asks.

John grits his teeth. "Go to Rutgers, find Lucy, kill any of these undead fucks that get in our way."

"Right," Matt says. "So. The usual, then."

John slides open the window, drops the duffels and Matt's bag of canned goods to the grass. He winces at the clinking of the cans, freezes for a heartbeat on the edge of the sill, his eyes piercing the shadows. No movement. No odor but the sweet scent of the lilac bush. He lets himself out carefully, unholsters his gun and sidles slowly along the wall to peer around the corner. The noise from the porch is louder here, but now he can also see the lights on up and down the street, hear the running footsteps and the screams from the next block. A pale form shuffles by under the streetlamp, and he makes out a nightgown torn and blood-soaked before the creature staggers out of his view. But there is nothing lurking by the car, and that's all he can care about right now.

He gestures for Matt to drop down onto the grass, hears him quietly gather up the bags and creep up behind him. 

A thirty second dash to the car, and then they will be on their way. To find Lucy. And save her from bloodthirsty walking corpses.

Yeah, just the usual.


End file.
